The Perfect CRPG: Encounters

A consummate encounter. (Screenshot taken from mynameisnotlilly's "let's play" on YouTube.)

In Baldur's Gate, there is a wilderness area south of Nashkel that you have no particular reason to visit in the course of the main plot, but that you might want to visit for character-building purposes. Wandering in the northern part of that map, you'll come across three fighters from nearby Amn: Sendai, Delgod, and Alexander. Sendai does the speaking for the group. She introduces herself arrogantly and refers to you and your party as "stupid northern barbarians" for listening to rumors that Amn is building up troops to wage war on Baldur's Gate.

At this point, you have three dialogue options:

1. "Are you saying that Amn does not threaten Baldur's Gate?"
2. "I am tired of being insulted by every pompous idiot that I come across. Draw steel!"
3. "Who are you, and what do you want?"

Let's pretend we choose Option 3. Sendai responds by identifying herself and her companions and saying that they have come to the area to hunt game, "but perhaps you would make for better sport."

This time, you have two dialogue options:

1. "What kind of monster would hunt his fellow human like a wild animal!?"
2. "Those are fighting words, missy, and I think you'll soon regret that you ever said them."

If you say #1, Sendai is offended that you'd take her literally when clearly she was joking, and she stalks off in a huff. If you choose #2 in either dialogue, you're launched into combat with the trio.

Think for a moment about what dialogue options you might choose in different role-playing scenarios, but now we have to introduce a third complication that might not be apparent if you've never played the game: these are named NPCs, and by now the player will have learned that named NPCs almost always have awesome equipment and are worth ten times the experience of random monsters. Sendai, in fact, carries a long sword +1 (doesn't sound like much, but you could easily get here before you've found anything better, and non-magic weapons break in this game), and even better, wears studded leather +2. Her companions have dozens of magic arrows. In short, you have every incentive to provoke them into combat--except if you care about role-playing a PC who doesn't slaughter people simply for being obnoxious.

This, to my mind, is a near-perfect example of a true CRPG "encounter," and it's one of dozens in Baldur's Gate. Instead of just having "three fighters" appear and immediately attack you, you're introduced to three named individuals, with unique personalities, and you're given the option to fight them or role-play your way out of combat--with real incentives either way. Even better, the encounter is utterly independent of any quest. (Baldur's Gate II is a great game, in some ways even better than its predecessor, but one of the reasons I like the first one better is because of all these fantastic miscellaneous encounters; almost every encounter in II, by contrast, is part of some quest.)
  
Skyrim has a few good examples of excellent encounters, but oddly, most of them are random. If you've played the game, think about the Thalmor, Imperial, and Stormcloak "prison trains" that you frequently encounter on the roads. When you stumble upon them, it puts you in a real role-playing conundrum. Do I hate the Thalmor enough to interrupt my current quest to attack them? Can I even defeat them? Am I just doing this for their expensive armor? When one of them confronts you and demands to know whether you worship Talos, do you tell the truth? Lie and say "no" to save your skin? Lie and say "yes," knowing that it'll lead to combat, because it's none of their damned business?

I always try to free the prisoner, but he always dies.

Moments like this are so good (at least, for a player like me) that when a game doesn't take the time to set up a decent encounter, I find it very disappointing. I can see why draugr just shamble towards me when I enter their ruins, but why does every petty bandit insist on attacking the moment I enter his line of sight? Don't any of them want to bargain for their lives? Why don't the dragons--who are supposed to be intelligent creatures, after all--ever have anything to say before they just start breathing fire at me? Morrowind, otherwise one of my favorite games, is incredibly disappointing for this reason. You'll encounter a group of orcs standing around a Daedric ruin in the middle of nowhere, but they don't have anything to say beyond what every orc says in every town you visit. "What are you doing here?," I want to scream.

These are some other examples of encounters that stand out in my mind, keeping in mind that I haven't played a lot of modern games:

• Baldur's Gate: You're walking through a forest and you come across a statue. Clearly, it's someone who's been turned to stone by a basilisk. Do you spend the money on the "stone to flesh" scroll to free her? Once you do, do you demand a reward or graciously decline?
• Skyrim: An old orc warrior approaches and says that he's grown too old to serve his god any more and wants someone to give him a "noble death." Do you oblige him and kill him in combat, or do your personal ethics recoil at such a thing? (And could you defeat him anyway? He looks tough.)

I wish you could convince him to accompany you. What's more noble than death at the jaws of a dragon?

  

• Baldur's Gate II: You run into a city of sahuagin on your way to defeat the game's main villain, who has literally stolen your soul. Do you stop and get involved in sahuagin politics or just kill anyone who stands between you and your objective?
• Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic: We all know how vicious the Sand People are. Now you've arrived at one of their enclaves, and you have to convince them to stop attacking some miners. The easiest solution--and the one that gets you the most experience--is just to kill all of them. It might even be the "right" solution. But you can also take the time to carefully negotiate with the leader and understand their perspective and history. 
• Neverwinter Nights: You're on a side quest to kill some wanted criminals, which you have to prove by bringing back their ears. One of your targets approaches you and seems sincere in his innocence. Do you kill him anyway to complete the quest, let him go, or convince him to hack off an ear? (I love this one because it puts my desire to role-play a "good" character in conflict with my desire not to leave unfinished quests.)

Remember, a good encounter is distinct from both a good quest and a good combat. A good encounter might be part of a quest, and it might lead to combat, but it is a fundamentally different phenomenon. It is a moment that forces you to pause, think, immerse yourself in the game, and (often) make a role-playing decision. You might think of encounters as existing between quests and combats, between the broad story and the individual rolls of the dice that determine the outcome of a fight.

So far in my chronology, only a few games have rated high in the "Encounters" category. Starflight is one, because it gave you real options when dealing with the various alien species. Pool of Radiance and Wasteland are the only games so far in which we see encounters that approximate what I've listed above (though Wasteland got a lower score in the category because of the "foes" aspect). I think Pool of Radiance did it best. As I wrote in my "final rating":

I can't think of any other game so far with so much variety in the types of encounters that you face. There's a traitor chained to the wall: do you free him, kill him, or interrogate him? Your mission is to stop the lizard man menace: do you do it by championing the old lizard man against his rival, or by just killing them all? You need to rescue a little boy from the buccaneer den: do you pick the lock and sneak out with him, free some nearby zoo animals to create a distraction, buy him from his jailers, or just kill all of the slavers? This is one of the only games to allow real role-playing options in the way you handle encounters, both quest-based and non-quest-based.

Pool of Radiance's dialogue options during dinner with the Zhent commander are the closest thing we've had so far to modern, pre-combat conversational encounters.

Unfortunately, the default in this era is simply to be walking down a corridor and suddenly face a party of "6 orcs" with no intervening context, dialogue, or decision-making. Partly for this reason, I've been regarding puzzles as a type of "encounter" although they don't precede combat. I also have "foes" as the second half of the GIMLET category for encounters, and you might think this is a strange combination, but fundamentally what I was trying to do with the "Encounters and Foes" category was rate the quality of the obstacles the game puts in your path.

In thinking about the dimensions that make up a good encounter, I came up with four distinct "levels," with level 2 split into two equal halves.

Level 0: The completely random,  non-encounter. The player is simply thrown into combat with a foe, more or less randomly, with no context, notice, or choices ahead of time. Such encounters exemplify the earliest CRPGs, like Ultima or Wizardry, when the player is simply wandering through a forest or hallway and suddenly meets a random enemy.
 

A whole series of non-encounters in Ultima II

Level 1: The contextual encounter. The encounter is preceded by some kind of introductory screen that gives the player a chance to review the foes, make plans, and perhaps make a basic choice about whether to stay or flee. Wizardry offered this type of encounter sometimes, with enemies who appeared as "friendly." More recently, we've seen these encounters in The Dark Heart of Uukrul, where a cut scene and some descriptive text preceded many enemies simply attacking you.
 

Uukrul preceded almost all of its major battles with brief contextual cut-screens.

Level 2A: The conversational encounter. This type of encounter includes some dialogue options before combat begins. It's not the same as "NPC dialogue" because most of that takes place in cities and towns with non-combatants. Think of it as "NPC dialogue" with lives on the line. There haven't been many examples of these in my playing so far; the closest approximations are the "attitudes" that you could adopt in Pool of Radiance, and there was one specific conversation in Pool of Radiance (with the commandant at the Zhent outpost) that comes close.
 

Good encounter dialogue has always been a staple of the interrelated Black Isle, Bioware, and Interplay games, starting with Baldur's Gate and continuing through DragonAge.

Level 2B: The choice encounter. In this version, you might not have any dialogue, but you do have some role-playing choices. In a combat-related encounter, these choices might determine whether the combat even occurs and, if so, what its parameters are.
 

There were places in which Wasteland offered some pretty good encounter options.

Level 3: The consummate encounter. This blends context, conversation, and choice into a single event in which role-playing dictates the result and combat might be averted. All the examples I listed at the top of the posting are consummate encounters. I can't recall any of these in the 75 games I've played so far, although some have come close, and it is possible that I'm forgetting one or two.

Through my perusal of postings and reviews on other sites, I've been more aware that many players actively dislike these elements in CRPGs. They like the puzzles, equipment, gold, and combats but would rather not have the artifice, the pseudo-immersion of the "encounter." I think their reasoning goes something like this: since no computer role-playing game will ever approximate the freedom of a tabletop role-playing game, why pretend that it will by offering a bunch of quasi-encounters in which you have limited choices? (If you dislike encounters in CRPGs but this isn't your argument, please comment below so I can understand it better.) While I understand the point logically, I don't understand it viscerally; these players are looking for an entirely different experience than I'm looking for in a CRPG.
 

But I admit there are plenty of "good" games with no good encounters. They haven't shown up in any roguelikes so far. The Ultima series has plenty of NPC dialogue, but I'm hard-pressed to think of a single good "encounter." The Might & Magic series is excellent for its plentiful side-quests, but lousy for any real role-playing in its various encounters. But in a "perfect CRPG," I want to see Level 3 encounters, and plenty of them.

What are your favorite "encounter" moments from CRPGs, and when do you think I'll start encountering them more often in my chronology?